Report: Abramson refused to sign non-disparagement agreement

5/27/14 1:48 PM EDT

Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of The New York Times, refused to sign a nondisparagement agreement after she was fired from the paper earlier this month, according to a new report from The New Yorker's Ken Auletta.

Abramson only signed a nondisclosure document precluding her from discussing the financial terms of her termination, friends of Abramson told Auletta. But she refused to sign a nondisparagement agreement, those friends said. Auletta quotes an "adviser" who says Abramson said: "Just as I’m not going to end my job at The New York Times by lying, I’m not giving up my right to free speech."

The revelation means that Abramson may address the details regarding her termination at some point in the future. To date, she has stayed silent on the issue, save for a commencement address at Wake Forest in which she spoke about resilience in the face of setbacks. Abramson's friends told Auletta she is unlikely to speak out soon, as she does not want to define herself "as a disgruntled, terminated editor rather than as the distinguished journalist she has unquestionably been."

Abramson was fired from the Times after Publisher Arthur Sulzberger concluded that she had misled both him and Chief Executive Mark Thompson during her effort to hire a new co-managing editor, two sources with knowledge of the reason for her termination told POLITICO earlier this month. That decision came after what Sulzberger himself said were years of internal frustration with her management of the newsroom.

Specifically, Abramson led both Sulzberger and Thompson to believe that she had consulted with now-executive editor Dean Baquet about her decision to offer The Guardian’s Janine Gibson a job as co-managing editor, the sources said. In fact, the sources said, Abramson had not consulted Baquet or Elder about her decision.

In the new report, Auletta includes a previously unpublished email in which Abramson indicated to Thompson that she planned to tell Baquet about the plan to hire Gibson and make her a co-managing editor.

"I expect this will be a fraught conversation. Because Dean is hard to really read," Abramson wrote. "I probably won’t know how he really feels or reacts."